It was Ed Miliband’s “Waterloo” — the moment he realised that his party would lose Nuneaton to the Tories, crushing Labour’s hopes in the 2015 general election.
A year on and the Tories, alongside Ukip, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, were vying to win seats on Nuneaton borough council where Labour had 28 councillors out of 34.
In the end Labour held on, losing three wards to the Tories, who now have six seats. The Greens have two and an Independent has the remaining seat.
Locals in the town centre yesterday debated whether Labour’s stranglehold would loosen. Michael Gadsby, 63, a retired detective in Warwickshire police, thought that the local Labour party would be hit hard by the furore over antisemitism and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
“It’s disgraceful what’s going on in Labour,” he said. “How MPs and senior figures can say that kind of stuff is ridiculous. I would not be at all surprised if they shed votes to the other parties, particularly Ukip.”
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Ukip campaigners handing out leaflets lamented the declining high street, loss of industry and the number of new houses being built outside the town. “We’re hoping to get votes from Labour who are just not listening to locals or debating anything in the council — everything is rubber-stamped,” Alwyn Waine, the campaign leader, said.
John Curtice, the elections analyst, accurately predicted that despite voting for a Tory MP last May, Nuneaton was unlikely to cut many Labour seats on the council. The real test would be Redditch, another satellite town of Birmingham, he said. Here Labour had held on to its majority by just one seat since 2014. Ukip was hoping to win one marginal seat from Labour. “It may be that no party has overall control,” Paul Swansborough, the council’s only Ukip member, said yesterday.
Patrick Holder, 49, a supermarket manager, said: “National politics does make a difference to how people vote even when it doesn’t affect what the council is doing. People don’t like the new leader. But the councillors here are good.”